My best friend and his wife visited this weekend to see my band play and see our beautiful new house and of course Aria, and we had an in-depth conversation about reconnecting with our past selves as a way of moving forward in our lives. Highlighting the people we’ve met, the friends we’ve lost touch with along the way, and how everything seems to come down to willpower and our own efforts, be it in work or relationships or eating and brushing your teeth. As daunting and maybe unfair as it is, the truth is that after a certain age, everything really is completely up to you and your ability to put energy forth into the world.

One of my fondest video game memories is the 90 hours or so I plunked into Final Fantasy VII as a kid. The whole first act of the game takes place in Midgar, an oppressive, gloomy city, carved out in claustrophobic corridors. It's dank, trashed out, and the sun literally never shines there. There's a scrappy underdog quality to everything you do there; it's not great, but it's home, and you've got your little niche (it's basically terrorism, but you know, good guy terrorism). About eight hours in, however, you up and leave the city, suddenly thrusting your party into the whole wide world, which up until then I wasn't even sure existed in this game. This blew my mind when I was a kid. Now we were no longer scavengers scraping by in a totalitarian hellhole, barely escaping with our lives. Now, we had to...to..